‘What of him?’
‘Did he have a sister?’
‘Yes, of course he did. I left her for you at the Lazar House, with the others.’
‘Well, I never saw her there. And now she’s at Nonsuch. We are discovered!’
‘At Nonsuch? How can she be? I ensured she was tranquil before I left. All you had to do was take her–’
‘She’s told Lord Lumley everything. It’s only a matter of time…’
Kat Vaesy takes Quigley by the shoulders of his riding cloak and – though she loves him for being Mathew’s brother – shakes him, like the little boy she has always suspected him to be. ‘Gabriel, the child cannot be at Nonsuch. The child is dead. Afterwards, you put her in the river with the others. Didn’t you?’
‘It was the summer before my first confinement in the Tower, Dr Shelby,’ Lumley tells Nicholas solemnly. ‘I’d returned from London to find Nonsuch in a state of great joy and celebration. Jane met me at the gatehouse. She told me Kat Warren and Mathew were to be wed. I couldn’t have been happier for them.’
‘And then Katherine’s father got in the way?’ Nicholas says.
‘Aye. He could not be moved by their love, or by my attempts to intercede on their behalf. I tried to reason with him. But a father’s governance is sacrosanct, is it not? That’s what God has ordained. And to be blunt, Mathew’s future was indeed bleak.’
‘So she married Vaesy instead.’
‘There was twenty years between them. I suggested a delay, until Kat was a little older. I hoped a postponement might cause Fulke to look elsewhere. But John Warren said he didn’t want his daughter sitting in a bower all day plucking forget-me-nots and moping over lost love, not when she could be bearing sons.’
Lizzy gently rests her fingertips on her husband’s arm. ‘John, there was something Kat said to me at Cold Oak, when we last dined together – something about never letting Fulke Vaesy near me, if I should’ – she pauses to glance at Nicholas, colouring at the thought of revealing intimacies to a near-stranger – ‘if I should find myself bearing your child. What did she mean by that?’
Lumley stares at his feet and slowly shakes his head. ‘After the marriage, Kat soon fell with child. At the birth Vaesy intervened. Something went wrong – he never told me what.’
‘I know she lost the infant. I know she almost died,’ Lizzy says. ‘But I didn’t know it was Fulke’s fault.’
Lumley seizes a fistful of his beard as though he intends to rip it from his flesh in a gesture of atonement. ‘Vaesy was my physician then,’ he says. ‘He was also my friend. I hold myself partly to blame. I should have tried harder to persuade John Warren to listen to his daughter.’
Lizzy waits for him to look up. Then she says, ‘Fulke Vaesy’s actions were his own, Husband, not yours. You were not culpable.’
‘But I could have stopped all this, a long time ago – if I’d understood,’ he says bleakly, looking around the privy chamber as though it’s suddenly become a prison cell. He puts his head in his hands and whispers, ‘Not dearest Kat as well – not the two of them together. Does this nightmare have no end?’
In the darkening orchard the mist is spreading like the creeping fingers of a ghostly hand. ‘Merciful Jesu, how did you let this happen?’ whispers Kat Vaesy into the shadows.
Quigley is unsure if Kat is addressing him or the spirit of his brother. ‘I’ll find another way to silence Shelby and the child, I promise you,’ he assures her.
‘How?’
‘When he returns to Bankside. I’ll pay someone to stage a quarrel, or a robbery. That’s easy enough to arrange in Southwark.’
‘And the maid?’
‘I’ll try to think of an enterprise to get her away from Nonsuch. But she’s not the immediate danger. After all, she’s a whore’s daughter – who will believe a word that comes out of her mouth? We’ll say the Devil has put a vile mischief into her heart.’
‘That still leaves John Lumley,’ says Kat. ‘I’m loath to do it, but there’s no alternative. I’ll have to denounce him to the Privy Council – anonymously, of course. I’ll claim he’s plotting an act of treason. He’ll be too busy defending himself from a cell in the Tower to interfere. It’s a shame, of course – I’ve always admired him.’
Quigley has to lean against a tree to steady himself. He can’t believe what he’s just heard. ‘But Lord Lumley has been your friend and champion for some twenty years! And what of Lady Elizabeth – your friend?’
‘Oh, Gabriel, do you still not understand? If some hard things must be done to honour Mathew’s memory, then they must be done without flinching. Did you not fortify yourself with that thought, every time you pressed home the scalpel blade? Or were you only ever doing this for the sport of it?’
The accusation stings. Quigley shakes his head violently, as though he’s trying to throw off the memory of Ralph Cullen, Jacob Monkton and the others. ‘Perhaps we should lie low for a while. Or we could go out of England, into France or Holland, continue our work there. Europe is more open to new science.’
‘We don’t have time, Gabriel. We’ve come so far. We’re so very close. We cannot let these people stop us.’ Kat’s face is as close to his as a lover’s. ‘Imagine it: you and me – revealing to the great scholars of Europe’s universities the true wellspring of the blood. How it is really propelled through the veins and the arteries. How it nourishes the organs. Where it goes when it has worked its miracle.’ Her voice becomes soft, urgent, enticing him with its promise. ‘You and I will overturn a thousand years of medicine! Think how foolish my husband and the rest of them will look – these masters of physic who have only ever studied a dead criminal, or cut open some poor stray dog.’ She searches Quigley’s eyes for the resolve she used to see in Mathew’s. ‘Don’t you remember what he used to say to us when we doubted?’
‘I hear it every time I close my eyes to sleep. Sapere aude – dare to know.’
‘Then you know we owe it to Mathew to go on. It’s all been for Mathew!’
Quigley is spellbound. He stares into Kat’s face with open adoration – not secretly, the way he’s done for twenty years, always hoping she’d return his gaze the way she’d returned his brother’s.
‘Gabriel,’ she says, her voice an urgent caress, ‘is there anyone else who knows? Anyone?’
And then he remembers.
‘Shelby spoke of a woman – she owns a tavern on Bankside. I believe they are close… very close.’
I have found myself caught up in a tempest… no matter how much I might wish it, I cannot stop the wind from howling…
It’s howling now, inside Nicholas’s head. He lies in his chamber at Nonsuch trying to seize hold of the swirling memories of the past forty-eight hours. But like all things storm-blown, they’re almost impossible to chase down and catch.
He pictures Elise Cullen as she describes the horror she’s witnessed. He sees John Lumley weeping over Francis Deniker’s body in the chapel. He sees him again in his study, journal in hand as he tries to deny the truth that’s in plain sight. He sees Elizabeth Lumley’s despair as she finally accepts the truth about Katherine Vaesy. And, worse, he imagines Gabriel Quigley still at large, somewhere beyond his reach, preparing once more some helpless victim for his knife. Unable to sleep, Nicholas wishes he could catch these swirling thoughts and lock them away somewhere they cannot harm him – as Francis Deniker hid his heretical trinkets in a travelling chest with a good, solid lock on it.